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Wireless Networking Patents Hardware Your Rights Online

Wi-Fi Redirect Gateway Patent for Hotspots 172

Posted by timothy from the mmmm-submarine dept.
Glenn Fleishman writes "Over at WiFiNetNews.com, we just broke the story that Nomadix was issued a patent covering hotspot gateway page redirection. Nomadix makes hardware and software for the hotspot industry, and this patent would cover redirection used by community networking portals (like NoCat), sponsored free networks (like NewburyOpen.Net), and fee networks (like Wayport, T-Mobile HotSpot, and Cometa). It's unclear what terms Nomadix wants for a license, but this patent seems to take a standard way of doing business and put it under fee -- although Nomadix may have been the first firm to employ this method for proxy URL redirection."
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Wi-Fi Redirect Gateway Patent for Hotspots More

Wi-Fi Redirect Gateway Patent for Hotspots

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  • Damn... (Score:1, Redundant)

    by meatball_mulligan ( 633993 ) *

    It's just getting ridiculous. We really need to do something about patent and copyright law in this country.

    m.m.

    • you think?

    • Re:Damn... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Quirk ( 36086 ) on Tuesday January 27, 2004 @12:56AM (#8096966) Homepage Journal
      The US Patent Office is just busy ensuring the future of America. When the rest of the world wakes up they'll face a bright new day of technological serfdom. Patents are the new chains of the third world.
      • US patents aren't automatically valid in the rest of the world. The US would like it to be so, but it hasn't happened yet. Right now, bogus US patents are just hurting US consumers (or subsidizing US industries, whichever way you want to look at it).
        • I agree but I also think any arguments that arise in the future between nations will take into account the earliest instance of conflicting patents.
          • I don't know what you mean by "take into account". It doesn't matter when you got your US patent, it just won't be valid in Europe. Unless you have actually applied for a European patent around the same time you applied for your US patent, you simply have no enforceable patent rights in Europe. And you can't make up for that by applying years later in Europe: once the invention has been published, it's published, even if the publication is a US patent. At best, you can use your US patent to try to invali
            • Poor post on my part, I was watching a Seinfeld rerun and envisioning a new world order wherein patents came under the juridiction of a single UN type office. Too much caffine and not enough sleep.cheers
  • this is looking to kill the OSS package. Has anyone had any experence with smone patenting somthing that already had a OSS using the method? Is there anything they can do about it?
    • it is a technique known as a DDOS.
    • Has anyone had any experence with smone patenting somthing that already had a OSS using the method?

      Do you realize that patents take THREE YEARS to process? They applied THREE YEARS AGO. Their idea was copied and put into open source software. The open source community wasn't the first to come up with it. Sorry.
      • No, it does not take 3 years to get a patent. You can get them in under a couple of months (you have to have a lot of money and a very unique idea).
        Until this shakes out a bit, it is hard to tell if OSS came up with it first or not. I suspect that prior-art of using re-direction to log-in would be significant and enough to stop this.

        Keep in mind that the vast majority of the reviewers are people waiting to earn their US citizenship. They are not really knowledgable in the arts nor are they native in englis

        • Re:no-auth? (Score:4, Informative)

          by ryanjensen ( 741218 ) on Tuesday January 27, 2004 @01:16AM (#8097081) Homepage Journal
          In this case, it took nearly four years to get the patent. United States Patent #6,636,894 was applied for on December 8, 1999 and was issued on October 21, 2003.

          Here's an easy way to tell if OSS came up with it first: when was the OSS project started, before or after December 8, 1999?

          • Re:no-auth? (Score:4, Interesting)

            by ajagci ( 737734 ) on Tuesday January 27, 2004 @02:05AM (#8097303)
            Well, just within a few minutes, I found dynacc [wolfsburg.de], which offered similar functionality in July 1999.

            But more importantly, the patent should be invalid simply because it's an obvious engineering solution. I'm sure we can find previous commercial or free implementations that go back to the early 1990's.

            As for why it took four years to get the patent--who knows. Maybe it was poorly written or maybe it was iffy to begin with. I also don't see what difference it would make even if this were a proper patent.

  • It just takes a little bogus info over DHCP... (Score:5, Informative)

    by LostCluster ( 625375 ) * on Tuesday January 27, 2004 @12:45AM (#8096892)
    Most schools have a similar setup for incoming students on wired networks... and this company is claiming their patent is not specific to wireless.

    The trick is simple to explain... it's a conditional DHCP server. If the MAC address is recognized, the user is supplied valid DHCP information and is allowed to go about their way to the open Internet. If the MAC address is not on the guest list, then the user is supplied an IP address that's in a firewall-restricted range so they can't get out, and DNS server that will map any domain name to the same place, the internal "Please pay..." server. No matter what the user's homepage is, all requests on port 80 will lead to the "Please pay..." page, and all other requests will get dropped on the floor. The internal DHCP settings are set to renew very frequently, so once the user pays they just have to wait a few seconds for their current DHCP settings to expire, an the next lease comes with the proper info.

    Still, that setup could be complex to be patented...
    • That's ridiculous that they can patent such a thing. We have multiple systems at UF similar to that except that we just have users register/login in order to get access. How the hades do you patent a no-brainer concept for making sure only people that are supposed to use your network are allowed to do so?
      • Because the patent text details a *novel* and *non-obvious* way to do it. Yes, you can say "Any network obviously needs to have users authenticate themselves." True, but that's not the point of the patent ... this patent protects the *specific* method of implementing user authentication outlined in its text.
    • I suspect most places assign a normal IP via DHCP, but until that IP (and MAC) are registered the transparent firewall won't let any traffic through. Any HTTP requests on port 80 get a temporary redirect response that sends them to the sign-in page instead, and once the user signs in the corresponding information is added to the firewall.

      I suspect that if anyone decides to fight the patent they won't have too much difficulty unless the patent was filed for quite a long while ago.

    • Re:It just takes a little bogus info over DHCP... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by sammy baby ( 14909 ) on Tuesday January 27, 2004 @12:53AM (#8096945) Journal
      Most schools have a similar setup for incoming students on wired networks... and this company is claiming their patent is not specific to wireless.

      Funny you should mention that. I'm an employee of a state system of higher education (I leave figuring out which one as an exercise for the reader). Several of the schools that I deal with in the system are using Bluesocket [bluesocket.com] boxes which would almost certainly be considered infringing devices. It will be interesting to see if Nomadix only approaches other vendors, or if they use the SCO tactic and go straight to consumers.

    • Re:It just takes a little bogus info over DHCP... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by jonabbey ( 2498 ) * <jonabbey@ganymeta.org> on Tuesday January 27, 2004 @12:55AM (#8096950) Homepage

      Yeah, we discussed doing exactly that here several years ago, for those users whose systems didn't have their MAC addresses properly registered in our systems database.

      If only I had realized we had a non-obvious, patentable idea that we could claim over everyone in the country, we'd be rich.

    • What happens if someone just manually sets their own settings instead of using DHCP? Can they get on the net then without going through the redirection?
      • In most such setups, yes. However, somebody trying to guess their way in would eventually get noticed... IP traffic will start coming from an address the server hasn't leased to anybody, and there's a MAC that's not on the approved list trying to get out.

        MAC spoofing might be a possible hole, but it would eventually get caught when the same user appears to be in two places at the same time.

    • Re:It just takes a little bogus info over DHCP... (Score:5, Informative)

      by KrispyKringle ( 672903 ) on Tuesday January 27, 2004 @12:55AM (#8096956)
      Actually, the far better way (far more secure, that is) is to give everyone IPs in the same range and have a default rule on the outgoing firewall (REDIRECT would be the iptables target) to redirect the destination on outgoing TCP/80 packets to the local authentication http server and allow no outgoing connections. Only after authentication is a special passthrough allowed for that IP/MAC combo.

      Even this method is open to session hijacking, depending largely on the behavior of the victim who's session is hijacked, but it's better than what you suggest (which only requires ignoring the DHCP server to bypass).

      Incidentally, I've been wrapping up a slightly more complex system of this for my employer. I can't remember where I got the idea to redirect outgoing port 80, but it seems pretty obvious to me. I know a couple of companies, such as Reefedge [reefedge.com] and Bluesocket [bluesocket.com] that do pretty much the same thing.

      Prior art, anyone?

      • Regarding the hijacking of the session, just do what NoCatAuth does: spawn an ssl'd pop-up that has a 5-minute refresh rate. Worst case, the hijacker gets 3-4 minutes of surfing, and then are forced to re-authenticate.

        NoCatAuth is what I use at home [artoo.net]. Even if you spoof my MAC, you still have to auth as me before you can go anywhere.
        • How would that help? So long as you hijack a session that's still active, you'd be fine. This relies on the victim not responding with RSTs to connections it never created, but this is probably what a Windows machine with ZoneAlarm would do (whoop-de-do, my machine is now ``stealthed'' :P).

          Not necessarily all that easy, but theoretically possible. The only solution I see is encrypting the whole thing with something like VPN.

      • Prior art, anyone?

        This patent covers a method of redirection thru manipulation of the arp protocol. In more 'geeky' terms, it's ethernet spoofing.

        I wonder if there's anybody on slashdot that would admit to, and show, a spoofing setup of an age sufficient to qualify as prior art. There's gotta be a few hundred here that qualify...

    • This should fail readily on challenge as it is obviously obvious technology, as easily evident by the ubiquitous use of the same methods.

      Then again, there's always Patent number 5,786,818 to stand as a grim (or humorous) reminder of how asinine this can be. Apparently, by 1998, no one had figured out a system that "...essentially follows the pointer and the equivalent of a single click is sent to objects such as icons or system menus for the desktop environment."

      The preexistence of the same features in X
    • Iowa state has been doing this for at least four years. And their technology works exactly the same over wifi. Sinc the method is media agnostic, couldn't you get around this patent simply by ignoring the fact that you're doing this over wifi?
    • About 200 lines of TCL code.

      I wrote a redirect system for a coffee shop that was installed back in September. I use a script to knit data together between iptables and dhcpd to sort out who paid and who didn't. A copy of tclhttpd provides the web interface.

      If your IP wasn't pulled from DHCP, or you mac address isn't listed as a paying customer you are redirected to the homepage of the coffee shop. It's actually a specially formated 404 error page, so I'm probably in the clear. Just remove the link to th

  • May be invalid for most purposes (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 27, 2004 @12:46AM (#8096904)
    According to this article [nocat.net] on the NoCatNet mailing list.

  • Is it just me... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jhoffoss ( 73895 ) on Tuesday January 27, 2004 @12:48AM (#8096913) Journal
    or would it not be all that difficult for a business to just put up a sign saying "Go to http://blah.com to begin" and deny everything else until a client does so?

    Sure URL redirection is neat, but is this that big a deal?

    As a standard prior art question, has anyone seen anything like this for wired networks or similar applications?

    • Yes, we do it at UF. In fact, we've got both wireless AND wired redirects for authenticating users before they're allowed to access the network. And this is nothing new. . .

    • Re:Is it just me... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by KrispyKringle ( 672903 ) on Tuesday January 27, 2004 @12:59AM (#8096980)
      Yes. It is a big deal.

      If you provide wireless over a large area, you don't mind perhaps putting up small signs to advertise that it's available in this area, but you don't want to have to put all the instructions, terms of use, etc up there. That's a lot of text.

      We aren't talking about businesses who's employees all already know this stuff. We're talking about universities, hotspots in hotels and airports, etc. Public hotspots, where users have to read a terms of use agreement and instructions before continuing, and who may not be the least bit familiar with the necessary steps.

      A lot of these sorts of people do this now. I can't remember where I got the idea for this myself, but I doubt I read it off of their patent application.

      • Re:Is it just me... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by jhoffoss ( 73895 )
        With all due respect, I said have a sign saying "Go here to start." Then you put the TOS, billing collection, whatever on that page.

        A sign saying "Wireless available. Visit www.wifico.com to start" would not be that taxing on the brain of someone capable of connecting to a wireless network in the first place. Not as simple as the open a browser to anywhere and get redicted method which this patent concerns, but still plenty simple.

        • True, you did. My apologies.

          That said, I still think that a) some places signs aren't obvious or can't be placed everywhere (do you really want to plaster a library with signs about wifi? what about parks and open locations?) and b) it's just easier to do it in such a way that all someone has to do is connect to the network to find out how to use it.

          Not saying it's a big deal, but the redirection thing is pretty nice. Also, it has the benefit of only harassing people who aren't yet authenticated (so t

    • I've seen a very similar system used for incoming freshmen at the University of West Virginia. All new MAC addresses are sent to a registration page requesting student numbers and what have you. After then you're good for a year of high speed edumacational intarwebing.
  • seems that each company just gets the latest technology, add the an existing technology or idea and try to corner the market by a patent.

    we need a slush fund to take these obvious ideas to court and get them invalidated.
    • in the category of for-what-its-worth, i spent a couple years at a company doing some genuinely innovative things, and filing patents on the same.

      just to give you a sense of "genuinely innovative", we would take the technology to experts in the field (people who had been working with that general class of technology for 10-20 years), to get a response of "you can't do that", followed by about an hour of explanation, at which point the response became "you can do that? wow! when can we have one?".

      there ar
    • [W]e need a slush fund to take these obvious ideas to court and get them invalidated.

      And play right into the hands of the IP attorneys that are helping file for these frivolous patents in the first place, enriching them further.

      No, the solution is to reform the USPTO itself. Patent applications need peer review. Or software patents need to be abolished.

  • In other news, the U.S Patent Office discontinued use of their Patent Archiving backup system when they discovered that slashdot was covering the release of all patents as "news".

  • In all fairness (Score:4, Informative)

    by argoff ( 142580 ) on Tuesday January 27, 2004 @12:55AM (#8096953)
    I hate (all) patents, but after working in technology companies awhile, I realized that many companies get patents because they half to - to keep someone else from getting one and screwing them over, and to get into cross-licensing agreements with other large companies - to keep them from being screwed over even more (with patent liability crap).

    Sadly, once a patent is gotten, it tends to take a life of it's own because of investor pressures. Patents do not help the honest littel inventor in the back yard (99% of the time) - I wish we could just get rid of them.

    • Re:In all fairness (Score:5, Insightful)

      by LostCluster ( 625375 ) * on Tuesday January 27, 2004 @01:30AM (#8097150)
      Sadly, once a patent is gotten, it tends to take a life of it's own because of investor pressures. Patents do not help the honest littel inventor in the back yard (99% of the time) - I wish we could just get rid of them.

      Yet, patents are something we just can't get rid of. Think of the medicine industry. To get a new drug, they have to do lots of research and testing... and sometimes the tests end in a failure which means all the money spent on the project is lost, it's a dud. When a working pill is invented, it might take only pennies to make the actual pill, but the research company has got to be paid for its effort. That's where the patent protection comes in, it allows the company to charge an inflated price for a specified number of years in order to recoop that investment... after which time the buzzer sounds and the generics rush in and the price plumets to be in line with the cost of the pill itself and not the discovery of the pill.

      How long that protection lasts, and what's enough of an advance to qualify for protection are both points for debate, but we can't exactly throw out patents all together if we want research to go forward...

      • Re:In all fairness (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward
        medicine seems to be a beast of its own when it comes to patents. medicine is one of the few things that should be allowed to be patented since it does take an incredible amount of money to not only invent., but to test.

        plus medical patents seem to be much more stringent since they have the whole FDA process which is limiting.

        medicine has fewer players unlike the garage inventors.

        patents take the rule that only one person can invent something uniquely. which is the major problem. lots of people invent
      • Yet, patents are something we just can't get rid of. Think of the medicine industry. To get a new drug, they have to do lots of research and testing...

        The drug industry is a beast quite unlike anything else. It should be handled without harming everyone else along the way. Perhaps we could link it's monopolies to the approval process. If a company is the first to get a drug approved it could be given a license to be the only producer for a fixed number of years. It could even be evaluated based on the co
      • Bullshit. The medical industry spends more on marketing than it does on drug development.
      • Yes, let's think about the medical industry.

        Right now we have multiple private companies duplicating effort trying to find a cure for AIDS. Once this cure is found, it will be the property of that single company and they will be able to charge whatever they want for it. If you don't understand what's wrong with that perhaps you should read about the recent battle over the production of generic AIDS drugs in Africa.

        God forbid we actually think about stopping this madness and working together to cure di
    • I realized that many companies get patents because they half to - to keep someone else from getting one and screwing them over

      That may be so, but when companies try to enforce such patents against others without provocation, it is hostile and needs to be condemned.

  • Prior Art? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Wouldn't many of the old "free shell" systems be considered prior art, or does the fact that you are using wireless instead of wires make this a new idea?

    I do seem to remeber telneting to a shell account, and being presented a list of terms for service and a registration dialog with my invalid login (and an opportunity to return to login in case a typo had brought me there).

    Does anyone else remeber this? Did nether.net operate this way at one time? Would this be enough to invalidate the patent?

  • This isn't nearly as bad as it sounds... (Score:5, Informative)

    by poptix_work ( 79063 ) * on Tuesday January 27, 2004 @12:57AM (#8096967) Homepage
    They applied for a very specific patent:

    The basic claim (which is what
    matters, not the invention descriptions) has seven steps, ALL of which much
    happen for the patent to cover your activities:

    1. A method for redirecting an original destination address access request
    to a redirected destination address, the method comprising the steps of:

    receiving, at a gateway device, all original destination address access
    requests originating from a computer;

    determining, at the gateway device, which of the original destination
    address requests require redirection;

    storing the original destination address if redirection is required;

    modifying, at the gateway device, the original destination address access
    request and communicating the modified request to a redirection server if
    redirection is required;

    responding, at the redirection server, to the modified request with a
    browser redirect message that reassigns the modified request to an
    administrator-specified, redirected destination address;

    intercepting, at the gateway device, the browser redirect message and
    modifying it with the stored original destination address; and

    sending the modified browser redirect message to the computer, which
    automatically redirects the computer to the redirected destination address.

    • Re:This isn't nearly as bad as it sounds... (Score:5, Informative)

      by zbaron ( 649094 ) on Tuesday January 27, 2004 @01:19AM (#8097093)

      What has been described here sounds very similar to the SSG-SESM [cisco.com] solution from Cisco Systems. This has been around for a very long time. I have been part of a project to implement an SSG solution for traffic accounting on a University network. We capture and redirect clients that have not logged in to a login page and once they have been authenticated, their browser continues to the originally requested location.

      In other projects this has been implemented as short DHCP leases and a bogus DNS that returns the same address for any hostname asked for. See NetReg2 [sourceforge.net] for more details.

  • It seems this patent is rather broken... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Qzukk ( 229616 ) on Tuesday January 27, 2004 @12:58AM (#8096976) Journal
    The obvious workaround is to simply not redirect. Install a transparent proxy and serve up your desired page on the first request. This defeats

    "modifying, at the gateway device, the original destination address access request and communicating the modified request to a redirection server if redirection is required;"

    Better yet, claim 1 is fatally flawed. It includes the words "storing the original destination address if redirection is required". Claim 6 is likewise flawed: "stores the original destination address request if redirection is required". So the really obvious and easiest solution is to do exactly what you've been doing, except that you don't store where the user was trying to go, and they have to type the URL or back up and hit the link again.

    While this was a valiant attempt by Nomadix to patent a process that was in common usage (my university used something with this effect, though not necessarially this process when I first hooked up on its dorm network the second half of my sophomore year, in '98), it ultimately falls short of the goal, and Nomadix should fire whatever patent attourney they had file this one.

  • Hotel networks have done this before WiFi (Score:3, Informative)

    by -tji ( 139690 ) on Tuesday January 27, 2004 @01:03AM (#8097009) Journal
    The link the the USPTO did not work for me, so I cannot see the dates on the patent. But, there were companies doing this exact same thing in hotel networks well before WiFi came around.

  • I was showing this technology to many companies back in '97 like iPort (now Cisco) and the likes.. They can all suck me.
  • I mean, cmon, what's the point anymore? This is such a large planet with such a vast collection of knowledge and information and so many people in so many different locales working on so many different projects that it is so very easily plausible that two or more people are going to invent the same idea (maybe slightly different) at the same time that patenting stuff is just pointless. It stems innovation so quickly at such a low level in it's development that there could have been a thousand other people

  • We did something like this. (Score:4, Informative)

    by threedays ( 16600 ) on Tuesday January 27, 2004 @01:06AM (#8097026)
    A company I worked for did this for wired networks, mostly hotels. Instead of DHCP, we actually had an arp spoofer, so we would pretend to be whatever gateway you wanted (if you had a static ip setup), or wed serve you dhcp, or whatever you asked for.

    No matter what webpage you requested, you got the sign up page to buy access. Pretty basic, and most hotel type places employ a system similar to this.

    this comment is probably not relevant.
    • Back at the now-defunct Pico Communications, I implemented one of those (for a Bluetooth access point) doing a TCP "man in the middle attack" that redirected their first outgoing TCP connection on port 80, then gave them back their regular net connection. They even made me write it up for a patent application, though I don't know if it was ever granted. It's interesting seeing all the different ways people have implemented the same technique...
    • I also did work like this both for wired and wireless networks in a job I had after graduating. But I also developed a lot of the underlying ideas independently during a co-op term at a research lab, back in Fall 1998. I later found out that other people had been doing work like this as well.

      I don't know enough about exact patent law to know if what I did up to that point would invalidate some or all of the patent (as the idea was not finished until much later).

  • What do you expect? (Score:5, Funny)

    by craw ( 6958 ) on Tuesday January 27, 2004 @01:09AM (#8097041) Homepage
    Patent this, patent that, stupid patents, obvious patents, blah, blah, blah.

    Geez, what do you expect? Do you really think that you are going to find an Einstein in the patent office?

    No, wait.
  • I would love to do this on my home wireless LAN. Can anyone point me to an free and/or open source way of doing this?

  • Similar product from 1998 (Score:5, Informative)

    by jpslacker ( 683666 ) <jpslacker@hotmail.com> on Tuesday January 27, 2004 @01:22AM (#8097109)
    A company I used to work for(CAIS Internet/Ardent Communications) had a gateway system that did this over five years ago for wired networks. Here are some links to old press releases refering to the gatway system, the IPORT. http://www.kiosks.org/newsbits/2000/021500d.htm http://news.com.com/2100-1033-207372.html?legacy=c net Ardent sold the system to Cisco in 2001: http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/prod_022001.html A short description of the software can be found here: http://www.isp-planet.com/equipment/iport.html
  • Time to challenge this with the apache mod that handles that has been around for several years. Also you can challenge that this is technically covered in the homepage autoload in web browsers which have been around since text web browser programs have been there.

    It's time to write your elected legislature and tell them you're tired of the patents and the system needs a overhaul. The USPTO thinks that they are not responsible for doing any simple research on a patent and that the Judicial system will sor
  • If what they're doing is novel, then yes, this is probably worthy of a patent. That does not mean that everyone else who does the same thing a different way is infringing. Contrary to the horror stories we keep hearing, patents are usually interpreted narrowly by the courts. I'm not worried... yet.
  • I am so sick of this crap. Why is it that when an obvious solution to an obvious problem presents itself, some ass munch somewhere thinks they own it? WTF is wrong with the world? If you need to hit something hard and you see a rock, does that mean that from then on you own all hammers, clubs and any other heavy blunt objects that might be used to hit something with?

    I am grinding my teeth right now.
    • It's only obvious because somebody came up with it first. If it was so obvious, why hasn't it been around forever?

      Look, I'm not in favor of a lot of patents, but if I came up with something so obvious people hadn't even thought of it yet, I'd want to be able to have the patent to protect my business I'm going to build around it.

      NoCat makes my life as a WISP sooooo much easier, if it wasn't free I would definitely pay for it. Wish they had gotten the patent first.

      --D

  • What to do? (Score:4, Informative)

    by teamhasnoi ( 554944 ) <teamhasnoi AT yahoo DOT com> on Tuesday January 27, 2004 @02:12AM (#8097324) Journal
    The way I understand it, the Patent office can't investigate many patents as the things discussed are beyond the ken of the Examiners. The Patent office accepts most everything applied for this reason, plus, every submission means money for the office.

    It is in the Patent Office's best interest to accept everything and let lawyers battle it out.

    So, why would someone smart enough to do a great job at an understaffed office work for government pay and crappy workload when they can work in the private sector for more $$$ and recognition?

    Why would the Patent Office examine patents thoroughly when they don't have to? When it is in their best interest to be a cash cow for the government? When the private sector does all the work, research, and 'enforcement'?

    How can we change the Patent office so that it's useful again? Here is a rather extensive history of the Patent Office. [myoutbox.net] (When it was useful)

    Answer these questions that are clouded by money, and we could have patents that actually encourage innovation and invention rather than controlling the use of obvious technology for which prior art is bigger than life.

  • Sometimes patents work, but in the opposite way (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Phil Karn ( 14620 ) <karn.ka9q@net> on Tuesday January 27, 2004 @02:36AM (#8097424) Homepage
    The very best patents are the ones that claim wretched, awful, braindamaged kludges that people should be prevented from using.

    This patent would appear to be a perfect example.

    • Once upon a time, a clever vulture decided to vomit on a corpse so that his friends would be less inclined to eat it and he would get more. His friends were repulsed, but ate it anyway. Normal birds, meanwhile, find more wholsome food.

      So goes the wireless world. The greedy jackasses will do thier best to shove hotspots into your face instead of offering wireless as a competitive edge. The same morons would charge for lighting and hot water if they could.

  • Prior Art: Apache, DNS, DHCP the list is so endless and obvious that these people should be made to spend a long time in jail.

    If Martha Stewart can be liable for jail time for what she did then thieves like this (to say nothing of SCO) should be stocking up on vaseline and cigarettes and getting ready for life inside.
  • ... If you read the patent and you are not an idiot or a murdering thief laywer (I call pro-IP and pro-patent lawyers are "murdering thieves" ... this is a bit like the way the RIAA calls music sharing "piracy" - sorry it's a bad personal habit I've been meaning to correct) then you will simply want to spread the word about the lying companies that are claiming patents on these technologies.

    They are essentially patenting "redirection" and the concept of a "gateway" - either becasue they are too stupid to r
    • Are you saying that patenting one method for doing wifi registration is equivalent to actually literally killing someone?

      • "Are you saying that patenting one method for doing wifi registration is equivalent to actually literally killing someone?"

        Yes, but I will take it back if people quit refering to sharing music as "piracy" (piracy is murder and theft on the high seas).

  • Hotspot Industry? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by serutan ( 259622 ) <snoopdoug@geekaz ... minus physicist> on Tuesday January 27, 2004 @03:26AM (#8097601) Homepage
    Just a petty gripe, go ahead and mod off-topic, but is there really a hotspot "industry?" A few days ago in an article featured here a guy selling virtual MUD objects was claiming to be the world leader in the "game enhancement industry." Give me a freakin break. A niche business isn't an industry.

    There. I feel better now. /takes deep breath, drinks more caffeine.
    • There have been hundreds of millions of dollars spent worldwide so far on building out for-fee hotspots that generate relatively small amounts of money (tens of millions a year). However, the commitments by US cellular carriers and overseas are in the $100Ms more, and whether the hotspot market for money fails or succeeds, it's an industry: specialized products, large venture-capital companies, existing companies entering the market. Even if hotspots wind up free, there's a ton of infrastructure and special
    • Yes! Look at how many subscribers T-Mobile and the like have through all the Starbucks, Airport cafe's, book stores, etc. etc.

      Sure, it's nothing compared to AOLs 15 gajillion subscribers, but there's definitelly an industry for the hardware, the software, and the expertise to install it and get it all up and running.

      Fortunately, it's an industry that still has a low cost of monitary entry, but a high cost of intellectual entry... something that unemployed geeks can once again have an advantage over the
  • These days, lots of companies file patents with no intention of ever making any money out of them.

    For startups, it's always nice to show an impressive patent list to investors. Usually easier to get more funding.

    Large companies encourage engineers to file patents (they sometimes get a small bonus, etc.) and again almost never try to make any money of them.

    These are the reasons we see many less-than-amazing patents filed these days. It *looks* good.

    There are some obvious counter-examples but these

    • You're right, except that large companies don't file patents because they look good. They file them so that when they sit down at the negotiating table with another company, they have as big a patent club as possible to swing. For startups, patents may be about impressing investors. For big corps, patents are all about strategy.

      In neither case, of course, are patents about producing and protecting useful and unique inventions.

  • uhhhh (Score:2, Insightful)

    by EmagGeek ( 574360 )
    iptables -t nat -I PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-ports $WEBSERVER_AUTH_PORT

    if (user_authenticated)
    iptables -t nat -I PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-ports $SQUID_PORT

    We've gotta do something about these "common sense" patents...

  • Remember Belkin's routers that hijacked http connections [cabalamat.org]? They seem to be doing the same thing as this so-called "invention".

    The patent is dated 24 October 2003, however Belkin's hijack software is earlier - it dates from 15 September 2003 or earlier [google.com], so it is presumably prior art.

    (IANA patent laywer).

  • Prior Art (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Fubar420 ( 701126 ) *
    I dont know about you, but I saw this in dozens of places across the country in summer 2000, with AND without wireless... Homestead Suites did it in their seattle place, and somehow I suspect the company that developed it did so previous to that.

    Heck, I had done this on my OWN PERSONAL LAN for shits and giggles before that. I think that this one will suffer a pretty quick demise, but if not, I'll go dig up an old hard driver or two.

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